Research means hitting wrong notes

February 07, 2016

KASF: Calligraphy, quills

I spent time yesterday testing out variously sized metal nibs, first with Calli ink and then with the iron gall stuff I bought. Re-learned that capillary action is effective, but works better with a gravity assist (that is, I need to watch the angle of the pen wrt the gravity vector). The Speedball nibs gave me some of the best results, but inconsistently. Other times, they felt gritty or uneven in some way. (I could try sanding them? Whetstone?) A tiny nib I inherited from a downsizing scribe also worked pretty well. I trimmed the nib on the quill I have (one of those Colonial Williamsburg souvenir jobs) and tried it - could be worse? Ink flow control problems.

Thinking ahead to how I'd document a mini-manuscript of songs or poetry (which as far as I know survive only in ecclesiastical, not secular, contexts), I found myself looking at information on Anglo-Saxon wills, and thought - why don't I just do a will instead? Much more appropriate for this persona (whom I have named 'Wulfstan' on his seal). A book on Anglo-Saxon wills is now incoming. I hope it has some information on their physical appearance - the internet is letting me down a little here. There's an 11th cen copy of King Alfred's will online, and I've found one picture of a thegn's will, but that picture is very tiny and possibly not showing the entire will.

I've got two turkey feathers soaking for quill-making. After cutting them open, I tried to trim the long pointy bit on the first - and it promptly cracked, in a very nib-like way. Not sure if that's going to exclude it from being a practice quill, although the Calligrapher's Handbook recommends just doing some practice work on a spare feather first anyway. I can use that one. I don't know if I want to use any quills I cut - my calligraphy isn't so great, so using a newbie-cut quill will probably just make it worse.

It was actually pretty cool - I was Googling around, looking for information on cutting quills, and came across a reference to the Calligrapher's Handbook. "Hm, sounds useful," I thought. "Maybe I should go look for that." When I went to get my Marc Drogin off the bookshelf for scribal testing, above, I found that I already had a copy! I don't even remember picking it up...

Final reminisce: My earliest memories of the SCA are fuzzy now, but one event I attended in I think my first year was a Schola in Settmour Swamp. I know I took a class on blackworking (of which I remember nothing) and one on quill-cutting (I remember only that the instructor had a coffee can of sand on a hot plate, to temper the quills).

UPDATE: Two turkey quill pens, done and functional! They are not flawless by any stretch, but my calligraphy isn't so great that I can even tell. I got one down to about a 1mm nib, and the other is still at 2mm. They work just fine - smoother contact with the page than the Speedball nibs, even. Tried them with the Calli ink and the iron gall ink, and they're good. Turns out pen-making isn't rocket science.

From our perspective, there is a more significant way in which the documents called Anglo-Saxon wills differ from their modern equivalents. Most or all of these legal texts were not what lawyers today would call dispositive or operative or what linguists might call a performantive document. Rather, they are written records of spoken legal transactions. While in some respects they have the look and feel of a modern will, they actually perform a radically different function.

There are a number of indications that Anglo-Saxon wills were merely records of oral transactions. Once piece of evidence is that the Old English word for a will, cwide, or cwid(th)e, derives from the verb cwed(th)and, whose primary meaning is "to speak." An archaic remnant of the verb is quoth, as in Edgar Allen Poe's famous line "quoth the raven 'nevermore'." It is also related to the verb bequeath.

Further evidence that Anglo-Saxon wills were not operative or performative documents is that they generally have no signature or seal or other type of authentication. This suggests that what really mattered was the words that came from the testator's mouth, not what was written on parchment afterwards. The names of witnesses were typically included in the document, but they likewise did not normally sign or place a seal on the document. Their function was to remember the contents of the testator's will, on the basis of what the testator said. (52)

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Yes, sanding steel nibs is a common remedy for issues (possibly even maintenance). Speedball reservoirs work better if you take some tweezers and bend them so they have a convex shape instead of being flat. Mistress Nuala would harp on me to keep the pen leaning on the finger near the knuckle, rather than letting it fall down to the base of my thumb.